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When I had my first real opportunity to use social media for business, I sat down and came up with ideas for witty tweets and interesting articles relating to the company I was working for. Then I began to post… and post… and post again. And believe it or not – I had nothing to show for my so called “creativity.” It quickly dawned on me that we had not even discussed what our goal was in utilizing social media for our business!

A social media strategy is crucial for a marketing campaign utilizing Facebook, twitter, and the blogosphere. I say crucial because otherwise you’ll do what I did: spend hours on coming up with content that was not irrelevant, but was not geared towards a specific accomplishment. Goals, in life or business, are extremely important because the give us something to work towards and accomplish. So what do we try and accomplish through social media? Well the the answer to that is in developing a social media strategy.

After a week or so of my “catchy” tweets and posts, I called my bosses and co-workers together and asked them “what do you want to get out of having our social media presence?” Well the answer came quickly: Sales. They weren’t looking for customer engagement or service – they had that on the site already. They wanted sales, sales, and more sales. If that meant constantly giving out discounts to people, then I was given free reign to distribute as such. They just wanted to pick up the cash flow.

With a clear objective in mind, you start to work differently. I worked on a plan to get people to our site and actually buy something. My goal was to get products moving off our shelves, and I was determined to do so. And I succeeded. Had the goal been to been to interact with our customers, I would have taken up a totally different frame of mind to accomplish my goal. I would’ve had to find our customers, get them talking with content and other means, and I’m sure I would have succeeded at that as well.

I may be a noob to social media, but one thing I am dead set on. Developing a strategy can be the most important part of this whole social experience. If you have a clear cut strategy in your head, you will reach your end goal… depending on how hard you work. As a matter of fact, my strategy with this blog is simply to get used to blogging about a subject, and that is being a total social nooby. And I believe I am following through in my strategy and that I will reach my goal of exiting noob-ville and becoming a social media pro through the help of all of you.

Posted by aryehkunstler in Uncategorized Tags: blogging, content, Facebook, Internet, marketing, media, noob, nooby, Social, twitter

Back to NY! I was thinking throughout my trip here to California that my biggest setback as social media wannabe is simply getting started. It is daunting and sometimes scary to take on a client who is entrusting you with their social media presence and marketing. A few months ago, I was given the opportunity to be the “director of social media” at an older health and beauty e-commerce site. Essentially it was an internship, but it was my first time actually using social media for a business as opposed to my own music marketing. I found some social media marketing plans to model after and I got to it. Well after just a week, I realized how little I knew about what i was doing. So in this post, I’ll go through some of the problems I faced and realized as social nooby.

1) Being on Facebook/Twitter does not make you a social media pro!
I had used Facebook and Twitter as a marketing tool for my own music, but what I was really doing was simply being a user of the two sites. I interacted with fans, friends, and family, but what I quickly came to realize is that when it comes to a business, the people you know and that know you are not going to like that page. Developing a strategy to draw leads and get existing customers to like and follow is a whole different ballpark then posting links to iTunes and the like.

2) Don’t forget the MARKETING!
I graduated college with a degree in marketing, so I had a little bit of education in the matter. But choosing the path of a musician did not allow me to really hone my skills as marketer. I never did an internship or have been involved in a business until I realized that maybe, just maybe I could do something in social media. What I soon discovered in actually working for a company in social media, was that you need to focus on how to use social media to market. Social media is simply an outlet and a tool to market, and you need to focus on marketing through them. You need to develop a marketing strategy before a social strategy is even talked about.

3) How to I get followers!?!?!
I was really at a loss for the first week of running the social media presence for this site. I kept to my planned tweeting and Facebook schedule, retweeted, responded to tweets, and yet no one followed, liked, or even interacted with me. It only hit me after a week that I needed to let our existing customers know about our social media presence. So we sent out a “Going Social” email to our customer list, offering a discount for everyone who liked or followed. Now that got things going.

On that note, something I am struggling with, and maybe someone can help me out here, is how do I go about getting like and follows for a brand new business?

These are just 3 things I struggled with and am still struggling with. I would love to hear your advice and thoughts on the matter.

Posted by aryehkunstler in Uncategorized Tags: blogging, content, Facebook, Internet, marketing, media, noob, nooby, Social, twitter

I am currently mid flight on the way to semi-sunny San Diego, CA for a concert this coming Sunday pretty much twiddling my thumbs as daytime TV isn’t so entertaining to me. It suddenly hit me that I should take this time to actually write about something I have thinking about as a social nooby.

Content is king. That is the bottom line for a great blog. If you’re giving to the community then the community will end up giving to you. The problem I have struggled with is how to write quality content. Now for this blog, I pretty much just ramble about my findings and discoveries as I try to really acquired a strong understanding of marketing socially. But in the future, when I am writing for an actual business, how will i consistently come up with quality content, and then find a way to repeat the previous quotes while being creative, informative, and engaging?

I play weddings almost every night, and often it’s a long drive home from the gig and I need something really interesting to keep me up. Lately I’ve discovered podcasts, and I often find myself sitting in my car outside my house at 3am just to finish a podcast I had started on the way home. From these podcasts, I have really gained a tremendous wealth of knowledge about Internet marketing, and I want to share two of the best content creating tips I heard.

In my last post I mentioned Jay Baer (@jaybaer). He is starting to become my idol in this field and when I found a podcast called Internet Marketing for Smart People interviewing Jay, I immediately downloaded it and threw myself in. I’ll bring up one main point that Jay spoke about, and that is giving to the community. He brought up the case of The Geek Squad, who posts tons of DIY and helpful YouTube videos on their channel. Now The Geek Squad makes money from helping people with their computers and the like, so why would they offer free help? Simply because the consumers who go to these videos will end up using them at a later point. Giving to the social community will back in the long run, and often marketers focus on the now result, when patience is needed to really see the fruits of their labors. So create quality that is helpful to you customers, and keep on helping.

My other favorite Internet marketing authority is Marcus Sheridan aka The Sales Lion(@thesaleslion). My one tip to quote from him is to listen to the daily questions asked about your business. Those are your blog titles! Answer the questions that people would ask, in a personal way, and you’ll see results. The quality content is there for the taking, it’s right in front of you to take and write about. Now back to my in flight entertainment… speak to us soon from Cali.

Posted by aryehkunstler in Uncategorized Tags: blogging, content, Facebook, Internet, marketing, media, noob, nooby, Social, twitter

One of the biggest questions I had in learning social media was “How do I encourage conversation?” I can post about about products all day long but unless there’s a general interest in it, nobody is going to comment or tweet back and start a conversation. So I began to experiment with my own music pages, trying out new ideas to generate some sort of conversation to see what works.

My first attempt was asking my fans what sort of songs they would like me to write as I work on my new album. Unfortunately, no one responded. I’d like to think that they like what I’m doing already, but I knew it had nothing to do with that. There was no real reason for them to post. I needed to create some sort of incentive for people to get in on the conversation. Luckily I had a show coming up with a new band that at the time was struggling to come up with a cool name. We were opening up for a popular band that was coming in from LA and it was a great opportunity for me to get my fans involved. So I asked my friends, family, and fans on Facebook for band name suggestions and offered two free tickets to the show to the individual who gave the name we would choose. Within the first half hour, there were over 100 responses. Everyone wanted to name the band. It wasn’t even about the tickets (they were only $15 at the door) but once there was an incentive, the conversation exploded. People just wanted to be creative and win. Ironically enough the winner lived in England and he didn’t even care about the tickets.

What I learned from this experiment was that people want to leave there mark, but you need to bait them to some degree. Offer a discount, a prize, anything that catches the interest of your audience and give them that reason to discuss you and your product.

Posted by aryehkunstler in Uncategorized Tags: blogging, content, Facebook, Internet, marketing, media, noob, nooby, Social, twitter

One of the first things I realized in my quest to conquer social media is that the way to learn is to follow those who already have conquered. After setting up the Social Nooby Twitter account, I immediately came across a Twitter guide of sorts. And the most important tip that I got from this guide was “follow the leaders in your field.” Now this seemed to me like obvious step, but I got way more out of it than I ever anticipated. You see, from following one particular social media expert – and yes, I said expert as you’ll see why in a bit – I discovered a few more incredible individuals and their blogs that I, as a budding socialist (no, not that kind) have already gained a tremendous amount from.

I had already stumbled upon Jay Baer (@jaybaer) from a Youtube clip someone had tweeted a few months ago and I find myself consistently looking out for his tweets as they are always extremely informational and enlightening. Well yesterday Jay retweeted a post from a blog called The Sales Lion entitled “The 3 Essential Qualities of a TRUE Social Media Expert.” Now I want to be a social media expert (that’s the purpose of this blog, right?) so of course I instantly went to check it out. And BAM, I was sold on this guy. Marcus Sheridan doesn’t necessarily focus on Facebook and Twitter, but more on content marketing through blogging. Now, if you read my first post, you would see that I always thought of blogging as somewhat of a lame thing my friends tried to start and quit after five posts (I’m up to two, so let’s see how I do). I downloaded his eBook and have thrown myself into his words of wisdom. Just to be clear – I am by no means a hired gun to gain publicity for this guy as he doesn’t need it. And besides that, so far my blog has had about eight or so reads, but I digress.

In order to become a social media expert, you need to see what the TRUE experts are doing. Guys like Jay and Marcus are experts and for me, following their lead is a huge step to becoming a true social media expert myself. In some sense, it reminds me of a classic saying from Ethics of the Fathers: “Let your house be a meetinghouse for the sages and sit amid the dust of their feet and drink in their words with thirst.” In the social space, your RSS, Twitter, and Facebook feeds are the houses and gather in the various sages and take their words in. Simply put – Follow the Leaders.”

Posted by aryehkunstler in Uncategorized Tags: blogging, content, Facebook, Internet, marketing, media, noob, nooby, Social, twitter

Social Media is all the rage right now. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have opened the doors to a new level of interaction for both people and brands by promoting conversion across the web. Suddenly, having a social media presence has become a necessity for businesses resulting in a boom of social media marketing strategists and specialists whose job it is to help businesses grow through their interactions on the social web.

I play guitar professionally and have been performing since I was in high school. But when it came time to choose a career I was stumped. I considered going to a music school or go the audio engineering route, but I felt a responsibility to choose a more “mainstream” major, just in case the music thing didn’t work out. I have always been intrigued by marketing and advertising, so after a brief stint in some psychology classes, I finally set out to be a marketing major. I found traditional marketing fascinating and while all this was going on, I was starting to realize that there definitely something to be said about the amount of followers I was getting on Facebook as a result of my music personality. After I came out with my first album, I couldn’t really fully afford to do an all out marketing campaign, so I took to Facebook to promote it and had some nice success. When I came out with my second album, I followed the same routine and saw even more success. Suddenly it occurred to me that I have a degree in marketing and I really was enjoying the world of social media so it must mean that I have what it takes to be a social media pro. Wrong.

Through a friend of mine, I got an internship to be the “director of social media” with an old school website selling health and beauty supplies who had just set up their social media accounts and literally had one Facebook fan. So I came up with a plan for what I wanted to post and set up a schedule for both Facebook and Twitter for posting. A few problems however: 1) There was no set goal in the campaign 2) My posts came off a bit spammy and 3) I literally had no idea how to gain new followers. It hit me then and there that I really had no idea what being a social media strategist was about. I thought blogging was an old school hobby that friends of mine had and the only three people who read it were my friends parents and wives. I realized that I was a total noob. Or nooby (socialnoob.com was taken…)

From there I went into social learning mode. Joined various social groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, followed a ton of big social personalities on Twitter, and threw myself into social media books and eBooks, both good and bad. While music pays the bills right now (I play guitar for one of the premier Jewish wedding bands in the tri-state area and have a very nice project studio in my house), I wanted to somehow get into the social media field. But in order to do that, you need to KNOW and OWN social media. And that’s what I’m doing. I am a social nooby and I plan on sharing my experiences learning about social media and give reviews on the various content that I read and gain from.

Introducing me – the social noob.

Posted by aryehkunstler in Uncategorized Tags: blogging, content, Facebook, Internet, marketing, media, noob, nooby, Social, twitter